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Mindset4 min read

What the LLM Council skill is

Run any high-stakes decision through five AI advisors who argue, peer-review each other anonymously, and hand you a verdict. Based on Karpathy's LLM Council.

You ask one AI a question, you get one answer. It might be great. It might be mid. You have no way to tell, because you only saw one perspective.

The council fixes that. It runs your question through five independent advisors, each one thinking from a different angle. Then they review each other's work. Then a chairman pulls everything into a final recommendation that tells you where the advisors agree, where they clash, and what you should actually do. It's adapted from Andrej Karpathy's LLM Council, rebuilt inside Claude using sub-agents with different thinking lenses.

When to run the council

The council is for questions where being wrong is expensive. Good council questions:

  • Should I launch a $97 workshop or a $497 course?
  • Which of these three positioning angles is strongest?
  • I'm thinking of pivoting from X to Y. Am I crazy?
  • Here's my landing page copy. What's weak?

Bad council questions are the ones with one right answer or no judgment involved: what's the capital of France, write me a tweet, summarize this article. And if you already know the answer and just want validation, it will probably tell you things you don't want to hear, which is the point.

The five advisors

Each one is a thinking style, not a job title. They're built to create tension with each other.

  • The Contrarian looks for what's wrong, what's missing, what will fail. The friend who saves you from a bad deal by asking the questions you're avoiding.
  • The First Principles Thinker ignores the surface question and asks what you're actually trying to solve. Sometimes the best thing you get out of it is hearing you're asking the wrong question entirely.
  • The Expansionist looks for the upside everyone else is missing. What could be bigger, what adjacent opportunity is hiding, what's undervalued.
  • The Pragmatist cares about what actually ships. Resources, timeline, the realistic next step.
  • The User Advocate speaks for the person on the other end, the customer or reader who has to feel the decision.

How to run it

Install the skill, then trigger it on any real decision with a phrase like "council this," "pressure-test this," or "stress-test this." The five advisors analyze your question independently, peer-review each other anonymously, and a chairman writes the final verdict. You walk away with the recommendation and exactly where the advisors disagree and why.

Grab the skill file at the top, drop it into your Claude setup, then say "run the council" on your next big decision and watch it argue with itself on your behalf.

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